This book for the first time brings together Gillian Beer's essays on Virginia Woolf. Widely recognised as a leading authority on Woolf and a sophisticated critic of modernism and fiction, Beer's essays make fascinating reading. Beer demonstrates, through close investigative textual readings, how Woolf's conceptualisations of history and narrative are intimately bound up with her ways of thinking about women, writing and social and sexual relations.
This book presents fourteen new essays by leading British and American writers on literature, science, and psychoanalysis. Written in honour of Gillian Beer, the collection pays homage to her major contribution to the theory and practice of interdisciplinary studies, with particular emphasis on the evolutionary sciences in nineteenth-century Britain, on psychoanalysis from Freud through to the late 1930s, and on the cultural contexts of science in the first half of the twentieth century.
An examination of Carroll's books about Alice explores the contextual knowledge of the time period in which it was written, addressing such topics as time, games, mathematics, and taxonomies.
Gillian Beer's classic Darwin's Plots, one of the most influential works of literary criticism and cultural history of the last quarter century, is here reissued in an updated edition to coincide with the anniversary of Darwin's birth and of the publication of The Origin of Species. Its focus on how writers, including George Eliot, Charles Kingsley and Thomas Hardy, responded to Darwin's discoveries and to his innovations in scientific language continues to open up new approaches to Darwin's thought and to its effects in the culture of his contemporaries. This third edition includes an important new essay that investigates Darwin's concern with consciousness across all forms of organic life. It demonstrates how this fascination persisted throughout his career and affected his methods and discoveries. With an updated bibliography reflecting recent work in the field, this book will retain its place at the heart of Victorian studies.
Science always raises more questions than it can contain. These acclaimed and challenging essays explore how ideas are transformed as they come under the stress of unforeseen readers. Using a wealth of material from diverse nineteenth- and twentieth-century writing, Gillian Beer tracks encounters between science, literature, and other forms of emotional experience. Her analysis discloses issues of chance, gender, nation, and desire. A substantial group of essays centres on Darwin and the incentives of his thinking from language theory to his encounters with Fuegians. Other essays include Hardy, Helmholtz, Hopkins, Clerk Maxwell, and Woolf. The collection throws a different light on Victorian experience and the rise of modernism, and engages with current controversies about the place of science in culture.
In this elegantly written collection Gillian Beer considers the difficulty of reading the past in essays on Thomas Carlyle, Philip Sidney, Samuel Richardson and Virginia Woolf.
Interdisciplinarity' has dynamised the Modern Humanities like no other recent academic trend. Yet, this presents serious challenges involving both translation and affect: how can we transmit facts and interpretations, sense and sensations between disciplines, between different artistic media, between cultures, between the private and the public sphere? What are the advantages, the difficulties, and risks? Another challenge concerns language: if single disciplines have produced their own technologies of reading and writing, this book examines and breaks the routine to propose alternative languages. Some of the most distinctive voices in criticism, both established and upcoming, from literature, music, the visual arts, psychoanalysis and philosophy, amongst others, show here their commitment to comparative thinking. The challenge has been to reach beyond the jargon and the epistemological constraints of individual disciplines while remaining coherent and incisive. The outcome successfully reveals new links between different forms of cultural expression. Gillian Beer (English Literature, Science Writing), Malcolm Bowie (French Literature, Psychoanalysis) and Beate Perrey (Music, Poetry, Psychoanalysis) are the instigators of the interdisplinary research project New Languages for Criticism: Cross-Currents and Resistances, which since 2002 has been under the auspices of CRASSH, the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Cambridge.
This is an enlarged edition of Professor Beer's volume on George Eliot which initially appeared in the `Key Women Writers' series issued by The Harvester Press. It was widely welcomed. Elaine Showalter, Professor of English, Princeton University said of it that "I feel convinced that the book will become one of the very few essential sources for all serious readers of George Eliot, whether or not they call themselves feminists.
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